The image of sacrifice is imposed on our reflection so necessarily that,
having passed the time when art was mere diversion or when religion
alone responded to the desire to enter into the depths of things, we
perceive that modem painting has ceased to offer us indifferent or
merely pretty images, that it is anxious to make the world “transpire”
on canvas. Apollinaire once claimed that cubism was a great religious
art, and his dream has not been lost. Modern painting prolongs the
repeated obsession with the sacrificial image in which the destruction
of objects responds, in a manner already half-conscious, to the enduring
function of religions. Caught in the trap of life, man is moved by a
field of attraction determined by a flash point where solid forms are
destroyed, where the various objects that constitute the world are
consumed as in a furnace of light. In truth, the character of current
painting — destruction, apocalypse of objects — is not put clearly into
relief, is not highlighted in the lineage of sacrifice. Yet, what the
surrealist painter wishes to see on the canvas where he assembles his
images does not differ fundamentally from what the Aztec crowd came to
see at the base of a pyramid where a victim’s heart was to be torn out.
In either case the flash of destruction is anticipated. Doubtless we do
not see cruelty when we envision modern artworks, but on the whole the
Aztecs were not cruel either. Or what leads us astray is the too simple
idea we have of cruelty. Generally we call cruelty that which we do not
have the heart to endure, while that which we endure easily, which is
ordinary to us, does not seem cruel. Thus what we call cruelty is always
that of others, and not being able to refrain from cruelty we deny it
as soon as it is ours. Such weaknesses suppress nothing but make it a
difficult task for anyone who seeks in these byways the hidden movement
of the human heart.